Presentation: ML for Question and Answer Understanding @Quora

Location: Seacliff ABC

Duration: 10:35am - 11:25am

Day of week: Monday

Level: Advanced

Persona: ML Engineer

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Abstract

Quora's mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge. On Quora, people ask questions on a wide range of topics and Quora surfaces those questions to people with relevant credentials and experiences so they can respond with an insightful, helpful answer. The more you use Quora—whether it’s to ask a question, answer one, or follow people or topics of interest—the better Quora gets. We’re constantly improving our ability to personalize an experience that’s filled with people, questions, and answers you’ve shown interest in. We achieve this via several machine learning and NLP systems.

In this talk, I will discuss these machine learning and NLP systems in depth. I will explore how we extract intelligence from questions on Quora, including how we do question-topic labeling, how we automatically correct questions with bad spelling and grammar, how we detect duplicate questions, how we learn to rank answers to questions and more. I will explain how the output of these systems supply an important input for the downstream machine learning applications that power Quora. Finally, I will highlight lessons I have learned from applying state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to consumer products at scale.

Speaker: Nikhil Dandekar

Leads NLP @Quora

Nikhil Dandekar is a Senior Engineering Manager at Quora, where he leads the NLP team. He joined Quora from Foursquare, where he led the search ranking team. Prior to that, he worked as an engineer and manager on several teams working on web search (Bing) at Microsoft. His expertise is in applying machine learning to internet-scale products.

Learn about machine learning in practice and on the horizon. Learn about ML at Quora, Uber's Michelangelo, ML workflow with Netflix Meson and topics on Bots, Conversational interfaces, automation, and deployment practices in the space.